Writing from the Center or the Margins? Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
Author(s): Samantha Manchester Earley
Source: African Studies Review, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Dec., 2003), pp. 1-16
Published by: African Studies Association
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the
from
Writing
Olaudah
Margins?
Life
Center
or
Equiano's
the
Writing
Reassessed
SamanthaManchesterEarley
Abstract: This article is a literary analysis of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano,
or GustavusVassa, the African. It examines Equiano's use of multiple discursive and
rhetorical strategies in order to move the self of his slave narrator from "marginal"
to "central" status in the international debate over slavery. The essay focuses on
Equiano's understanding of morality as a multicultural framework and his application of Christian rhetoric in explaining it. The main argument is that his search for
religious understanding and his experiential knowledge allowed him to move
between cultural "centers" and cultural "margins"while speaking with an authoritative voice against slavery.
Resume: Cet article propose une analyse litteraire de l'autobiographie de Olaudah
Equiano, ou Gustavus Vassa, l'africain. Nous examinons l'utilisation faite par
Equiano de strategies discursives et rhetoriques multiples destinees a deplacer le
moi de son narrateur esclave d'un statut "marginal"a un statut "central" dans le
debat international sur l'esclavage. Cet essai se concentre sur la comprehension de
la moralite chez Equiano comme phenomene multiculturel, et sur son application
de la rhetorique chretienne dans l'explication de ce phenomene. L'argument principal est que sa recherche de comprehension religieuse et sa connaissance
empirique du monde lui permettent de se d6placer entre des "centres de culture"
et des "marges de culture" tout en s'elevant contre l'esclavage d'une voix qui fait
autorite.
AfricanStudiesReview,Volume 46, Number 3 (December 2003), pp. 1-16
Samantha Manchester Earley is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Indiana. Her research focuses on issues in African,
African American, and women's literature. Her doctoral dissertation examined
slavery, slave narratives, and the literary construction of the self of slave narrators, tracing that construction from Olaudah Equiano (1789) through Toni Morrison's "Sethe" in the neoslave narrative Beloved(1987).
2
African Studies Review
Introduction
Olaudah Equiano's autobiography, The InterestingNarrative of the Life of
OlaudahEquiano, or GustavusVassa,theAfrican. WrittenbyHimself,was a bestseller when it was published in 1789, and in the past few years it has seen a
resurgence in popularity. The text has been analyzed historically by Paul
Edwards (1981, 1985) and by G. I. Jones, who traces Equiano's roots back
to a fairly exact location in what was the Benin Kingdom (1967).
In addition to being traced and positioned historically, Equiano's InterestingNarrativehas come under the scrutiny of literary critics. His use of the
generic conventions of autobiography has been examined by Angelo
Costanzo (1987), and the use to which he put the self or selves created in
his autobiography has been delineated by Chinosole (1982), Susan Marren
(1993), Marion Rust (1996), and Carl Plasa (2000). In his critique of discursive identities in self-construction, Chinosole argues that the point-ofview shifts in the text are indicative of "marginal and multiple identities,"
while Marren discusses these as multiple narrating selves serving as transgressors against cultural voices that would negate Equiano's existence. Rust
understands Equiano's self as the condition of a black African "passing"for
a white Englishman. Carl Plasa discusses Equiano's use of British imperial
discourse, arguing that Equiano appropriated the discourses of his oppressors in order to deconstruct his position as an object of colonial rule. Thus
present-day scholars and critics have read Equiano's text with and against
the grain of literary, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Moreover, each has
had a different interpretation of Equiano's position as a writer and a narrator speaking with an authoritative voice from a cultural "center" or with
a placating voice from a cultural "margin."1
To date, however, there have been very few studies of Equiano's religious conversion and his use of religious discourse in constructing himself
and his slave narrator in a position of centrality and authority when speaking about issues of slavery and freedom, evil and goodness, wickedness and
morality. Adam Potkay's "Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography" (1994) is a comprehensive look at Equiano's use of the form
and conventions of the spiritual autobiography as a "theological quest for
origins" (678). Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds interprets Equiano's religious
conversion as "a story of fiscal growth" in which the author delves into mercantile capitalism and makes a profit; she argues that as "aformer slave and
African moving through a world of European and American whites,
Equiano's successes, spiritual and commercial, seem to come at the cost of
his identity as an African, a member of a community for whom he from
time to time ventures to speak" (1998:635).
In this article, I discuss Equino's use of the conventions of Christian
spiritual autobiography as one of many contexts for the creation of a narrative self. Equiano's conversion, I will argue, is central to a reader's understanding of the text-although Christianity was not the only authority with
Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
3
which Equiano spoke. Equiano wrote specifically about the significance of
Christianity in Britain, a nation, he says, that has "exalted the dignity of
human nature" ([1789] 1987:3). Thus the authoritative voice of spiritual
conversion comes from Equiano the Christian, who also has situated himself at the heart of Englishness. At the same time, Equiano wrote from the
position of someone who was global in his cultural references. His point of
view on issues could and did vary; often it is British, but frequently it is
some other, equally valid, equally centered position emerging from his own
particular experiential knowledge of the world. The Christian narrative
functions in a particular way, as both a strategy for constructing a narrating
self and as a strategy for positioning that self at the moral center. It allowed
Equiano, an African-born ex-slave living among European cultures and
societies, to move himself-both literally and literarily-from the dominant European cultural "margins"to a culturally "central"position and to
speak and write against slavery with an authoritative voice. An examination
of TheInterestingNarrativeas spiritual autobiography provides insights into
the role of Christianity not only in Equiano's life, but also in the lives of
many of his contemporaries in the African diaspora.
Equiano's Discursive Realities
Equiano was faced with the intellectual task of maneuvering through multiple cultural mazes, including economic and political assumptions as well
as religious beliefs and entanglements, in order to obtain freedom for himself and to advocate freedom for his fellow enslaved Africans. On the one
hand, he had to create a character and a narrative that explained the horrors of the slave trade with the intention of causing the perpetrators of the
trade to cease the practice voluntarily. At the same time, he could not insult
the sensibilities and sensitivities of the members of the culture that controlled that trade. Moreover, in his position as narrator he had to construct
himself, both as author and as character, as a rational, articulate Christian
subject. Of course, this mission was no small undertaking during a time
when Africans and their progeny were commonly portrayed as unintelligent, unthinking brutes. As a writer and as a speaking subject wishing to
persuade the British Parliament to abolish the slave trade, Equiano would
have known that the Anglo-American economic, political, and religious discourses of the time were useful models for his own text.
Equiano's narrative, however, does not merely reproduce existing discursive formations. As a narrative subject, Equiano attempted to develop a
voice of his own, an ideological space wherein he was an individual with a
particular class affiliation as well as a strong sense of racial belonging-of
Africanness. As such, his narrative provides an interesting picture of the
contradictions gripping his own Igbo society and also the Anglo world in
which he found himself. He extols his fellow countrymen as upstanding cit-
4
African Studies Review
izens of a global world while at the same time writing frankly about their
own slave-trading practices. He praises the "freedom-loving" British while
exposing the doxa of the English-the belief that Africans were laboring
brutes and mere objects of trade-to have its foundation in political interest and economic manipulation.2 As Pierre Bourdieu has said, Equiano
challenged existing notions of how British society operated by exposing
"the constitution of a field of opinion,the locus of the confrontation of competing discourses-whose political truth may be overtly declared or may
remain hidden, even from the eyes of those engaged in it, under the guise
of religious or philosophical oppositions" (1994:163; emphasis in original).
In TheInterestingNarrative,Equiano exposes Anglo-European society's
contradictions both by overt declaration and by hidden means. Consider,
for instance, his statements in the "Dedication," in which he says that even
though he was torn away from his family at a young age, he felt himself to
be "infinitely more than compensated by the introduction [he] thence
obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion" ([1789] 1987:3). He
claims that his coming to know England, with its "liberal sentiments, its
humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in
arts and sciences... [which have] exalted the dignity of human nature" was
compensation enough for the loss of his family ([1789] 1987:3). Equino's
declarations about "liberal sentiments," "humanity," and "glorious freedom" appear, on the surface, to be the words of a colonized subject who
has fully embraced the conventions, morality, and racial discourse of the
colonial power. His slave narrator here might be seen as representing what
AbdulJonMohamed has called "hegemonic colonialism" (1985:62): a state
in which "the natives accept a version of the colonizer's entire system of valmode of production"
ues, attitudes, morality, institutions, and...
in
be
other
to
words,
seems,
(1985:62). Equaino
speaking as the hegecolonized
as
his
mind
itself
had been colonized;
"other," though
monically
he seems to have developed, in the words of Edward Said, "a consciousness
that assumed the subordination of a designated inferior Other"
(1994:210).
It was the colonial power's thesis, of course, that slavery was actually
good for the slaves because it introduced and often converted them to
Christianity. Yet I would argue that Equaino, far from accepting himself
and his Igbo people and culture as the "inferior"other of Anglo-American
racial discourse, used that very same discourse to undermine the colonial
narrative and reformulate that culture's notion of "slave"and "African."
Moreover, he did so with a profound sense of the injustices done to himself
and his fellow Africans. Slaves, free blacks, and Africans were the bulwark
of a burgeoning Anglo-American economy-they were central, in other
words, to the economic, political, and social domination of Europe. At the
same time, people of African descent were marginal within Euro-American
society, in which they constituted an ignored and abused underclass. Thus
Equiano's self-construction as both an African and an English-speaking
Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
5
subject, an African and a Christian, and an African and a moral human
being was a strategic maneuver, allowing him, as we shall see, to position
himself as an observant spokesman with multiple sources of authority.
This, then, was the cultural milieu within which Olaudah Equiano was
operating when he dedicated his life story to the members of Parliament.
A highly intelligent, self-educated man, Equiano was aware of the multiple
discourses used to debate slavery.Because of his experiences as both a slave
and a free man, he was able to choose selectively which discourses he would
manipulate. In his InterestingNarrative, he uses religious, economic, and
political discourses in new and clever ways in order to forward his own
political aims. As he does this, he places himself and his own life story at
the center of the multiple debates taking place within the British empire,
including questions about the state of African people's souls and their usefulness as traders versus objects of trade. In so doing he also speaks for
other Africans and demonstrates their ability to think for themselves, articulate their viewpoints, and defend themselves against British popular
notions of darker-skinned people.
The Subject's Identity-Fringes or Center?
In "Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah
Equiano's Autobiography," Susan Marren argues that Equiano articulated
a "transgressiveself," a self that was not "a stable identity or essence in itself
but rather... a fluid positioning, a mode of articulation of newly imagined,
radically nonbinary subjectivities" (1993:95). She further claims that this
"transgressive self' was connected to his "entirely marginal" status as a
"freed person," a position in which he could find no political definition of
himself, having neither the restrictions of a slave nor the political or legal
rights of a free white (1993:95). I would argue, instead, that Equiano constructed a narrative self-or selves-not because he existed outside of
Anglo-American culture, but because, as a subject fully centered within his
own experiences, he could use the various discourses of that culture to
alter popular notions of himself as an African. In other words, he appropriated and refashioned Anglo-American discourses, especially religious
and economic discourses, in order to create his narrative self, to dialogue
with the dominant culture, and, ultimately, to presage the abolition of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade.
For example, in The InterestingNarrative Equiano contrasts the slave
trade in his native land to the Anglo-American slave trade that he had experienced personally and observed all around him. While Africans did,
indeed, practice slavery and buy and sell their own countrymen, he portrays the indigenous African system as relatively more benign than the
European one. In Africa, slavery existed as a punishment for social misdeeds or as a result of warfare: Slaves were "prisoners of war, or such among
6
African Studies Review
us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and some other
crimes, which we esteemed heinous" ([1789] 1987:17). Equiano recalls
that when the Oye-Eboe (people from a neighboring community) used to
pass through his country with slaves for sale, his fellow countrymen did not
allow these slave-traders to pass unchallenged. Nor did they ignore the histories of the individual slaves or the origins of their servitude in order to
gather workers for profit. Rather, Equiano declares, "the strictest account
is exacted of [the traders'] manner of procuring [the slaves], before they
are suffered to pass" ([1789] 1987:17). Unlike the Anglo-American traders,
his people were very careful about ascertaining the legitimacy of a slave's
status. In cases of prisoners of war, they often had fought those wars and
captured those prisoners themselves, so they had no doubt that these were
lawful captives. In other cases they demanded a strict account not merely
of the captives they bought and transported, but even of any captive who
just set foot in their land. And, unlike the white slave traders who, more
than likely, did not speak the language of the slaves or attempt to communicate with them, his countrymen spoke with the slaves themselves.
In contrast, he remembers trying to speak up when he himself was
being sold into slavery; he was warned that he "talked too much English"
and should be silent ([1789] 1987:65). But Equiano never gave up his right
to speak both for himself and for his fellow Africans, or to insist on the
immorality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. From first-hand experience he
was able to indict the dominant Anglo-American institution of slavery,
which involved almost exclusively the buying and selling not of legitimate
prisoners of war, as the white slave-traders maintained, but of kidnapped
human beings like Equiano and his sister. In the auctioning of slaves, families were destroyed; husbands were sold awayfrom wives and children were
sold away from parents. These practices not only broke up the families but
also erased the basic identity structures of the slaves. According to
Equiano's construction, American slavery was a tool in creating marginalized individuals, rather than a punishment for those who were already marginal for legitimate reasons. On such an immoral system, he suggests, rested an enormous part of the Anglo-American economic structure.
Equaino also argues, in fact, that many of the battles that Africans
fought with each other may actually have been instigated by greed for the
European goods the traders exchanged for those captives: "Perhaps they
were incited to this by those traders, who brought amongst us the European goods" ([1789] 1987:18), he says. The word incitedis particularly significant here; it suggests a further denunciation of the colonial powers for
having disrupted the traditional African economic system, depleted its economic resources, and destroyed its social fiber. Equiano's perception of the
economic impetus and the social cost of African ethnic wars details what
AbdulJanMohamed later would term the "dominant phase" of colonialism,
the phase in which the indigenous peoples "are subjugated by colonialist
material practices" to act against their own cultural values and mores
Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
7
(1985:62). The colonization of Africa began, in other words, with the creation of an economic desire that prompted Africans to war with one another. Once this internal division was in place, and once the Africans had
depleted their own numbers, European armies could further divide and
conquer, extracting material wealth for the home governments along the
way (Rodney 1972;JanMohamed 1985:62).
Interestingly enough, while Equiano criticizes the desire for European
goods and vilifies the European traders who created that desire, his slave
narrator in many instances appears to praise those traders. He states that
"in seeing that these white people did not sell one another as we did, I was
much pleased: and in this I thought they were much happier than we
Africans." He claims to be "astonished at the wisdom of the white people in
all things which I beheld" ([1789] 1987:43). Yet having established the relative legitimacy and morality of his own nation's trade in slaves-and by
extension having condemned, though obliquely, the Europeans, who were
no better than kidnappers-Equiano, here as elsewhere, has to be read not
only for the literal message, but also for what is said between the lines.
Equiano's protestations about the superiority of European culture are the
reflections of a colonized subject who indeed has internalized the colonizer's discourse-in order to appropriate it and fight against it. Significantly,
most of Equiano's avowals of European cultural superiority are followed by
a particular criticism. Though he is astonished by white people's people's
"wisdom... in all things," for example, he is also astonished to see them
"eating with unwashed hands, and touching the dead" ([1789] 1987:43).
Equiano did not, in fact, accept European culture as superior to his own.
Instead, he recovered a discursive space from within the dominating culture, an endeavor that is crucial in cultures of resistance. As Edward Said
has said,"Toachieve recognition is to rechart and occupy the place in imperial cultural forms reserved for subordination, to occupy it self-consciously,
fighting for it on the very same territory" as that of the intruders (1994:
210). In this way Equiano recharted and, by the same gesture, occupied,
the world of slave-holders by dissecting, among others, the notion that the
nations of "liberal humanism" and "human dignity" were engaging in ajustified and morally acceptable practice.
Equiano as Slave-Trader:
Sense of Ethical Self
The Clash of Economics
and a
Whether Equiano merely put his native country's traditions into practice
when he acted as an agent to purchase slaves is questionable, however.
Equiano had been hired by a man named Dr. Irving to run his plantation
on the Musquito Shore. Of his one recorded foray into slave purchasing
Equiano states: "I went with the Doctor on board a Guineaman, to purchase some slaves to carry with us, and cultivate a plantation; and I chose
8
African Studies Review
them all of my own countrymen" ([1789] 1987:154). He claims that he
treated the slaves he bought "with care and affection" and attempted to
"comfort the poor creatures, and render their condition easy" ([1789]
Marion Rust, discussing Equiano's cooperative
1987:159)-although
that
this reference to the slaves as "poor creatures"
even
behavior, suggests
indicates not his benevolence, but rather "the degree to which he...
approximated imperialist economic ethics" (1996:24). Whichever is the
case, Equiano ultimately found "the mode of procedure and living," on the
Musquito Shore plantation very "irksome,"and pressed the Doctor for his
discharge, declaring that the Bible claimed: "Whatdoes it avail a man if he
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" ([1789] 1987:159). Officially, Equiano says that "working on Sundays"was the cause of his dissatisfaction. But it is clear that he also resisted further participation in the oppression of his own countrymen, for, as we discover later, he interprets the misdeeds and mishaps that befell him after he left that Musquito Shore plantation as God's punishment.
Equaino shipped on board a vessel commanded by a half-deranged
captain who starved his crew, threatened to blow up the ship, and refused
to pay Equiano his wages. For this last indignity Equiano has no legal
recourse, since his oath "could not be admitted against a white man"
([1789] 1987:165-66). Declaring that he "thought this exceedingly hard
usage," he manages to escape with his life and searched for an Englandbound ship. He concedes his own guilt for his part in the slave trade and
accepts the punishment meted out by God-a request for forgiveness that
also, of course, holds up a mirror to the guilt of all slave-holders, including
white practitioners who showed less humanity, less liberal sentiment, and,
significantly, less Christianity. What one finds, then, in The InterestingNarrativeis a gradual development of the narrator's position. From a veiled critique of Anglo-American protestations about Christianity and freedom he
moves to a position that one could call multiculturalist-neither universally condemning the white man nor elevating his own culture above all others. This is a point of view that transcends hierarchy, one in which he is able
to acknowledge both the differences among individual white men and also
the similarities that exist between different cultures. And finally, as we shall
see, he comes, through religious conversion, to frame all of these convictions in terms of a universal religious worldview.
Equiano's Multicultural, Multicentered Worldview
In his initial encounters with the white men, Equiano conceived of them in
terms of religious images and ideas. He condemned the slave-holders' tendency to see all Africans as the "sons of Ham," thus exposing the perversity of using a religious framework to define or enslave others for economic
gain. For his own part, he says of this first encounter with whites, "Iwas now
Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
9
persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were
going to kill me. Their complexions too, differing so much from ours, their
long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any
I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief' ([1789] 1987:33).
Having no other means of defining these creatures who looked like men
but were so different from himself and the men to whom he was accustomed, the young Equiano reverted to his religious upbringing to explain
these "monsters": they must be "bad spirits." Significantly, his criteria for
judging them in this way-by their complexions, their hair, and their language-were identical to those used by the white culture to designate
Africans (and those of African descent) as inferior and to equate blacks
with evil. In other words, Equiano's use of the religious discourse-indeed,
his echoing of the very words used by whites to "prove"the enslavability of
blacks-points to the fallacy of accepting pervasive discursive articulations
as "natural" conditions of a particular society or culture. Implicitly he is
beginning to understand the importance of considering multiple views on
any particular event or cultural assumption: the need to resist the kind of
ideological blindness that often justifies and leads to the oppression of others.
Within a few months of Equiano's initial acquaintance with white people, he says that he began to notice differences among them. For instance,
while serving Captain Pascal upon the "Industrious Bee" (a name evoking
both the Protestant work ethic and New England's role in the slave trade),
he was treated well. He notes that "everybody on board used me very kindly, quite contrary to what I had seen of any white people before; I therefore
began to think that they were not all of the same disposition" ([1789]
1987:40). In other words, Equiano the narrator begins to differentiate
among men based not upon skin color, hair texture, and language, but
upon character and morality-qualities of individuals rather than of groups.
In Equiano's search for religious faith, too, he says that he began to
question culturally limited definition of "good" and "moral," discovering
that no one culture-including the Anglo-Americans, with their elevated
notions about themselves and "those like us"-has a monopoly on virtue.
He studies the Bible and is "wonderfully surprised to see the laws and rules
of my own country written almost exactly here; a circumstance which, I
believe, tended to impress our manners and customs more deeply on my
memory" ([1789] 1987: 64). He visits different places of worship. And he
begins to ask his acquaintances about their keeping of the Ten Commandments, commenting that "finding those, who in general termed themselves
Christians, not so honest nor so good in their morals as the Turks, I really
thought that the Turks were in a safer way of salvation than my neighbors .... " ([1789] 1987:134). This religious quest deepens Equiano's growing conviction that no one people, religion, or culture is uniquely representative of virtue and morality. Rather, he comes to understand that it is
individual human beings who do or do not share basic moral values, what-
10
African Studies Review
ever their professed creed. And, by the same token, no individual automatically can be condemned as the evil "other."
In addition, while repudiating the false cultural distinctions set up by
the Anglo-American world between themselves and the "other," Equiano
discovers, and accepts, the more important distinction that Frederick Douglass would make almost a century later in his Narrativeof theLife of FrederickDouglass-the distinction between the true Christianity of Christ and the
false Christianity of the slave-owning and slave-trading world. Moreover,
Equiano's cultural relativism, his recognition of the morality of multiple
world cultures and religious persuasions, is exactly in line with the basic
tenets of Christianity-the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' commandment (John 13: 34) for us to love one another. When Equiano apprehends
that the laws of the Bible are practiced in his own land, and that the Turks
follow the Ten Commandments, he recognizes the universality of principles of moral conduct embedded in the Bible. His conversion to Christianity, then, has both spiritual and practical components. On the one
hand, he embraces the strong moral and ethical principles of the Old and
New Testaments whose ideas, he decides, transcend any one culture's
appropriation. On the other hand, as a Christian living in England, he not
only has access to the most readily available form of worship, but he also
has an insider's view of the ideology of his oppressors.
Marion Rust has found something suspect in the radical tolerance of
Equaino's multiculturalism and religious universalism. He claims that
Equiano's self-positioning as an English Christian involved an odd mental
distinction between "English"and "white":that by "abrilliant metonymy, by
which membership in a nation is substituted for 'complexion'" (1996: 33),
Equiano was able to become British by equating "British"with the doctrine
of freedom while aligning "whites" with "enslavers." Rust also maintains
that because Equiano could make "geography coeval with moral states"
(1996:33)-that is, because Equiano could see "English" as "good" but
"white" as "evil"-he could "smooth over ruptures in his past that would
otherwise threaten to turn him into at least two entirely distinct and antagonistic beings, African and Englishman, slave and purchaser of slaves"
(1996:33). This argument, however, does not do justice to the complexity
of Equiano's self-definition, or to the multiplicity of narratives in which he
was able to position himself. Equiano constructed many selves in his writing and was able to maneuver among multiple discourses that allowed him
to be both "African" and "Englishman" simultaneously. Even Equiano's
buying of slaves can be understood as one aspect of his multiple identities
and definitions-the notion of a person who was once "property"purchasing other human "property"would have defied explanation within AngloAmerican racial discourse. In other words, by varying his narrative selves as
well as accommodating "contradictory"discourses, Equaino could advocate
multiple cultural relationships and acknowledge that all cultures are always
in some active, international, interracial state of becoming.
Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
11
The crucial distinction in Equiano, then, is not between black and
white, or between African and Englishman, but between good and evil, or
between God and mankind. If Rust is correct about Equiano's equating
whiteness with evil, the narrator would have reacted negatively to the Native
American's reference to him as a white man while on voyage to Jamaica
([1789] 1987:154).3 Instead, he merely replies that the white men on board
were waywardand "do not fear God" ([1789] 1987:154), deflecting the issue
of color and focusing on ethics and morals as touchstones. Neither is it possible for the narrator to equate British culture, the culture of those who had
denied him his freedom, his economic standing, and his prosperity,with the
"good." His expression of disgust with those who rape the women being
transported aboard the ship is illustrative:"I have even known them to gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practised to such a scandalous excess, that one of our
captains discharged the mate and others on that account" ([1789] 1987:74).
While Equiano here overtly criticizes those white sailors who practiced
"abominations" on young African girls, he is more covertly criticizing the
dominant rule-giving establishment that protected such sinners. He insinuates that an equal abomination is the fact that these men were fired only
after they had raped these girls to a "scandalous excess." This subtle criticism of the law-making and law-enforcing establishment peaks with
Equiano's juxtaposed corollary to that scene. Whereas those white sailors
were merely "discharged"after having committed "scandalous excesses" and
"abominations," a black man who has sex with a white prostitute is "staked
to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit"
([1789] 1987:74). This man was likely castrated ("cut most shockingly") and
further tortured for having sex with a prostitute, while those white men who
raped a child were merely fired from theirjobs. As appalling as these crimes
are, Equiano is above all castigating an entire society that could support the
rape of young black girls but was ready to condone the castration and torture of black men. Even the mention of the "one" captain who discharged
the rapists proves his point; whether this captain was truly a decent person,
or whether he merely was acting on whim, Equiano shows that justice and
morality had to depend on the idiosyncratic behavior of one individual,
rather than on larger social structures.
When Marion Rust argues that Equaino, by separating "good British"
from "evil white" achieved, by sleight-of-hand, a questionable form of selfintegration, he also is arguing that Equiano, in his position of cultural relativist, evades moral judgment altogether: Equiano, he says, "allows contradiction to keep its place in the text; mediation takes the place of
either/or" (1996:34). But I would like to argue the contrary: Moral judgment does exist in Equaino's text, though one must know where and how
to find it. TheInterestingNarrative,as I have suggested, is in form and content a conversion narrative-and it is to this aspect of the text that I would
like to turn now.
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African Studies Review
Equiano's Conversion, Biblical Typology, and Economic
Prosperity
The InterestingNarrativeis, above all else, a spiritual autobiography. In the
experience of conversion, Equiano comes to the conclusion that meneven men of another color who held him in bondage-were not to be
feared as omnipotent gods. After witnessing accidents and deaths on board
ship, he realizes that white men could not control their own fates, much
less the fate of others. He tells us that in his everyday life and in the lives of
those around him, he apprehended that without God's permission, "a sparrow cannot fall" ([1789] 1987:60), and thus he began "to raise [his] fear
from man to Him alone" ([1789] 1987:60). In this respect, Equiano
addresses himself to those of any culture who, misguidedly, are fearful of
other men, and he indicts all people who dare to treat others as different
from themselves. In particular, he condemns those who kept him enslaved
on the basis of his physical difference while at the same time raising themselves to the level of omnipotent powers. Equiano, in other words, accuses
the buyers and sellers of slaves of committing the sin of raising themselves
to the level of God.
Furthermore, in making the link between his own revelations about
human equality and the tenets of multiple world religions, Equiano indicts
the hypocrisy of the Anglo-American culture, which dared to appropriate
religious language and ideas in order to justify slavery. In Equiano's analysis, religion teaches respect for and recognition of a physical or cultural
"other" as a human being with a soul: a radical understanding of freedom
that Anglo-American culture-and the antislavery advocates within itlacked.
The context of spiritual autobiography becomes particularly apparent
in the final section of The InterestingNarrative.Equiano tells us that upon
purchasing his freedom he recalled two biblical passages that mirrored his
emotional state. Interestingly, these biblical passages also foreshadow his
eventual economic prosperity and moral revenge upon his oppressors.
Equiano recalls that as he was going to the Register Office to obtain his
manumission papers, "I called to mind the words of the Psalmist, in the
126th Psalm" ([1789] 1987:100) celebrating the freedom of Zion and
prophesying great economic and emotional prosperity for the children of
Zion: "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and
weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing,
bringing his sheaves with him." By equating his emotions upon manumission to those expressed in the Old Testament, Equiano not only links his
own fate, and by extension the fates of all black, enslaved people, to that of
the Jewish people, but he also foreshadows the prosperity of his coming
business ventures while on voyage with Captain Farmer. He foreshadows, in
a sense, the turkeys that he will bring on board amidst a flurry of emotions
and that eventually will earn him a 300 percent profit!
Olaudah Equiano's Writing Life Reassessed
13
Beyond this, Equiano's purchase of himself from his "master"suggests
his "mastery"of the entire system of international capitalism, a competence
that places him as a competitive agent within the economic system of his
English oppressors. He declares that he found himself "master of about
forty-seven pounds" ([1789] 1987: 99) which he used to buy his freedom, a
comment that echoes the promise to the children of Zion that they will
"sowin tears"but will "reap in joy." It also indicates, as Marion Rust has stated, that he was "not only purchasing manumission, but also legitimacy within the world into which he has been kidnapped" (1996:27). He states of his
feelings upon being released from captivity that "like the apostle Peter
(whose deliverance from prison was so sudden and extraordinary, that he
thought he was in a vision) I could scarcely believe I was awake" ([1789]
1987: 101). While Equiano certainly must have been ecstatic after purchasing his freedom, that freedom was something he had planned on, worked
for, and saved his money to obtain. Unlike Peter in Acts 12:7, whose deliverance was effected by an angel, Equiano produced his own emancipation.
Thus his conflation of economic and religious discourses has multiple resonances: it not only points out the underlying economic interests of the
European slave-holders, but also articulates a selfhood that those same
slave-holders would deny.
More subtly, Equiano's biblical references upon his manumission serve
to condemn his oppressors and call down God's wrath upon them. For
instance, in Acts 12:21-22, Peter's oppressor, Herod, is struck down by God
("And upon a set day, Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne
and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is
the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the
Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of
worms and gave up the ghost"). In parallel fashion Equiano's oppressor on
his voyage- Captain Farmer, who declares that Equiano cannot bring his
bullocks on board to transport and sell in the islands-dies, struck by one
of the bullocks, which "butted him so furiously in the breast, that he never
recovered of the blow" ([1789] 1987: 105). Like Herod, who was struck by
the angel of the Lord and eaten by worms, Equiano's oppressor (about
whom, he says with much self-restraint, he did not "think well" because the
man was "so much worse than his word") is struck, figuratively, by the hand
of God, and Equiano stands by as the sailors "committed his body to the
deep" ([1789] 1987:106).
Conclusion
Olaudah Equiano's construction of his narrative selves exposed the power
structures flourishing in the Anglo-American class-driven society. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1994:165), in this type of society, "the struggle for
the power to impose the legitimate mode of thought and expression that is
14
African Studies Review
unceasingly waged in the field of the production of symbolic goods tend [s]
to conceal, not least from the eyes of those involved in it, the contribution
it makes to the delimitation of the universe of discourse, that is to say, the
universe of the thinkable, and hence to the delimitation of the universe of
the unthinkable." Olaudah Equiano operated both within this system, as an
English-speaking subject who could negotiate these ideological discourses,
and in systems outside the Anglo-American one. His worldly experience
and multicultural worldview enhanced his ability to see problems, dilemmas, and assertions as constructions of discourse; as a result, he was never
one to allow himself to be defined by those discourses without articulating
a counterargument. Equiano, therefore, exposed to himself and to others
that the racist construction of Anglo-American perceptions about Africans
were not "natural"and that the "natural"character of all social "facts"must
be questioned. Moreover, in his ability to position himself at the center of
many perspectives of international conflict and concern, Equiano indicated and advocated that a multicultural worldview was necessary for sustained and sustainable growth: spiritual, political, economic, and social.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the
African Studies Association in Philadelphia, November 1999. The author is
grateful to the conference participants for their insightful comments, especially on the notions of "margin"and "center."The comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers were also most helpful, as were the contributions of Hannington Ochwada and Richard Wafula.
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Notes
1.
This struggle between adopting an oppressor's discursive strategies and
remaining grounded in one's own cultural truths, which may be marginalized
in the oppressor's discourses, is common to African writers from colonialism
through the postcolonial times. Although a detailed analysis of the community of African writers who use English as a means to reach a wider audience and
to restate, rewrite, and rework a "master discourse" is beyond the scope of this
article, several sources should be mentioned. Abiola Irele refers to the connections between Olaudah Equiano and Chinua Achebe in TheAfricanExperiencein Literatureand Ideology([1981] 1990). CriticalPerspectiveson ChinuaAchebe
(1978), edited by C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors, and Achebe's Morning Yet
on CreationDay (1975) also detail postcolonial African writers' reactions to and
uses of an oppressor's discursive strategies for liberation, justification, and lit-
16
2.
3.
African Studies Review
erary creation. Equiano, then, was at the beginning of a long tradition of
African writers using the English language for multiple purposes-social, political, and literary included.
Pierre Buordieu called ideas that naturalize what is arbitrary doxa, "so as to distinguish [them] from... orthodox or heterodox belief[s] implying awareness
and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs"
(1994:160). It was within eighteenth-century cultural doxa incorporating both
biblical and economic debate that Olaudah Equiano constructed his Interesting
Narrativeand the selves that narrated that life.
Equiano had been discussing Christianity with the Native American, who in
turn had been observing the other "Christians"on the ship. The Native American was finally so perplexed by the disparity between what the Christians
preached and believed and how they lived that he was prompted to ask
Equiano: "How comes it that all the white men on board, who can read and
write, observe the sun and know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk, only
excepting yourself?" ([1789] 1987: 154).